AN ENTERTAINING TALE OF QUADRUPEDS

While touring the island of Crete after attending a Computer
Science conference there in July 1990, I walked into a modest used books
store in the town of Chania and picked an anthology of medieval Greek
poetry, a subject barely known even in Greece. Most of the poems or
fragments of poems there did not appeal that much to me at that time; but
the strange, allegorical poem about a certain animal conference stood out:
there I saw an obliquely subversive style of writing blended with sarcasm
and a powerful language combining elements of both ancient and modern Greek.
Three years later I located the entire text (as edited by Vassiliki
Tsiouni in 1972) and posted a rough translation (together with the
original text in Latinized Greek and minimal commentary) on usenet:
it took 42 segments and almost the entire academic year 1993-94.
After a couple of years I improved the translation and my understanding
of the poem with the help of Tassos
Karanastassis, a researcher at
Aristotle University's Center of Byzantine Studies in Thessaloniki.
A better, metrical translation with extensive introduction and
commentary, joint work (1995-2003) with Nick Nicholas and based on a so
far
unpublished critical
edition by Manolis Papathomopoulos (2010), has
been published by
Columbia
University Press (Records of Western
Civilization Series) in June
2003.
Our work has also been presented at the 19th International Congress of
Byzantine Studies (Copenhagen, August 1996),
the 10th Conference of the Australian Association of Byzantine Studies
(Canberra, April 1997) and the 26th
Byzantine Studies Conference (Harvard, October
2000). Below you see a small tribute (based on the Copenhagen
presentation) to the poem's eternal themes and humble heroes, some of whom
you may meet
right here, be it through a group 'photo' (in
ˆa paradisiac setting) or 'individually' (boar,
buffalo).